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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

A three hour trip

With the theme from Gilligan's island stuck in my head, we set off at 5:45 this morning to go shrimping and fishing. A gorgeous morning awaited us, complete with a double sunrise, peaking first through a low band of clouds, and subsequently rising above the band.

The shrimping here has been off for the past few days, apparently --- and today was no different. We caught essentially nothing. To be precise, we caught a shrimp. And a 90 count shrimp at that!

So, we moved on from the shrimp grounds to fishing, all of us dropping lines over the side of the boat, mostly thrilled by catching whiting. There were some more moments of excitement though: Boo's first catch was a sand shark (which distressed her a little), as was her second. She finally caught a couple of fish too, though.

Skibo was disappointed not to catch any sharks, but thrilled with catching fish.

For me, the highlight was when the rod bent much further than before: clearly something bigger was on the line. The boat captain took the rod from me, and passed it out along the side of the boat, and told me to stand on the wooden platform at the stern: I lowered the rod, reeling in as I did, then lifted the rod, lowered and reeled, lifted, over and over, until finally I had pulled up a very large ray. Very large for me, at least: probably two, perhaps three feet across. I didn't land it in the boat: the captain unhooked it and released it.